Records reveal Agent Orange used in B.C. Interior

Larry Heal believes he has been suffering the effects of exposure to industrial herbicides used in the province during in the 1960's and ’70s.

In 1964, the U.S. military was already two years into its herbicidal warfare program known as Operation Ranch Hand, spraying millions of acres of the Vietnamese landscape with defoliating chemical agents referred to as the rainbow herbicides: Agents Pink, Green, Blue, White, Purple and Orange.

Heal, who currently resides in Malakwa, says he was exposed to similar chemicals during his childhood in Cherryville, and that he has been suffering ailments of one kind or another ever since. He found some relief this month, though, with the release of a CTV news exposé, in which the news organization purports to have “several hundred pages of documents” that support the story Heal has been telling for years: herbicide combinations that comprise Agent Orange and other rainbow herbicides were used by the B.C. government around power lines near his family home in Cherryville.